Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2021 20:39:45 GMT -5
A Sun(2/3/2021)
A Sun is a Taiwanese drama that had something of a strange journey to semi-prominence. The film had won some plaudits in Asia but in this country was sitting around in plain sight on Netflix for months without critics really bringing it up. Netflix (who likely obtained the film with their foreign markets in mind) hadn’t publicized it and there wasn’t really a release date for critics to write for. Then late in the year Peter Debruge at Variety (a publication that reviews everything) put it at the top of his year-end list, at which point other critics took notice and started catching up with it. It’s kind of an off-putting release story, one that exposes the dangers of how things can fall through the cracks when uncaring streaming services view things mainly as “content” rather than prospects to be nurtured. Regardless, this is definitely a movie worth watching. It’s a bit like other Taiwanese classics like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Time to Live and the Time to Die in that it’s this sprawling drama about a family but it’s also probably a more accessible watch than both of those movies. It opens with a scene of two teenagers rushing another teenager in a restaurant and cutting off his hand with a machete. We then spend the rest of the film examining one of those attackers (the accomplice, not the hand cutter) and the effect that his arrest has on the rest of his family. I was not familiar with director and co-writer Chung Mong-hong before watching this and suspect he may be someone I’ll need to catch up with because he shows obvious skill here. There are a couple of visual choices here and there I might quibble with and the film could maybe stand to signpost some of the passage of time a little more clearly, but for the most part the visuals are solid and I certainly found myself interested in this family and its fate.
**** out of Five
A Sun is a Taiwanese drama that had something of a strange journey to semi-prominence. The film had won some plaudits in Asia but in this country was sitting around in plain sight on Netflix for months without critics really bringing it up. Netflix (who likely obtained the film with their foreign markets in mind) hadn’t publicized it and there wasn’t really a release date for critics to write for. Then late in the year Peter Debruge at Variety (a publication that reviews everything) put it at the top of his year-end list, at which point other critics took notice and started catching up with it. It’s kind of an off-putting release story, one that exposes the dangers of how things can fall through the cracks when uncaring streaming services view things mainly as “content” rather than prospects to be nurtured. Regardless, this is definitely a movie worth watching. It’s a bit like other Taiwanese classics like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi or Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Time to Live and the Time to Die in that it’s this sprawling drama about a family but it’s also probably a more accessible watch than both of those movies. It opens with a scene of two teenagers rushing another teenager in a restaurant and cutting off his hand with a machete. We then spend the rest of the film examining one of those attackers (the accomplice, not the hand cutter) and the effect that his arrest has on the rest of his family. I was not familiar with director and co-writer Chung Mong-hong before watching this and suspect he may be someone I’ll need to catch up with because he shows obvious skill here. There are a couple of visual choices here and there I might quibble with and the film could maybe stand to signpost some of the passage of time a little more clearly, but for the most part the visuals are solid and I certainly found myself interested in this family and its fate.
**** out of Five
